The B Word

Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television

Maria San Filippo

Publication Year: 2013

Often disguised in public discourse by terms like "gay," "homoerotic," "homosocial," or "queer," bisexuality is strangely absent from queer studies and virtually untreated in film and media criticism. Maria San Filippo aims to explore the central role bisexuality plays in contemporary screen culture, establishing its importance in representation, marketing, and spectatorship. By examining a variety of media genres including art cinema, sexploitation cinema and vampire films, "bromances," and series television, San Filippo discovers "missed moments" where bisexual readings of these texts reveal a more malleable notion of subjectivity and eroticism. San Filippo's work moves beyond the subject of heteronormativity and responds to "compulsory monosexuality," where it's not necessarily a couple's gender that is at issue, but rather that an individual chooses one or the other. The B Word transcends dominant relational formation (gay, straight, or otherwise) and brings a discursive voice to the field of queer and film studies.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Chasing Amy and Bisexual (In)visibility

When asked about this book’s topic, I typically respond
that it deals with bisexuality in film and television. The most frequent
response, offered up by people from diverse areas of my life, is, “You
mean like Chasing Amy?” This American independent film about a self-proclaimed
lesbian who is forced to question her sexual identity after...

Introduction: Binary Trouble and Compulsory Monosexuality

Why is it that Chasing Amy, released in 1997, comes no
closer to “speaking” bisexuality than Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus?
In a now-legendary scene, cut from the original release, Crassus
(Laurence Olivier) suggestively tells Antoninus (Tony Curtis) that his
“taste includes both snails and oysters.” Or, in the considerable critical...

1. Unthinking Monosexuality: Bisexual Representability in Art Cinema

Though Schrader’s remark, clearly intended to provoke,
may go too far in consigning popular commercial cinema and art cinema
to opposing sides of the Atlantic, it offers a useful starting point for
thinking about the expectations that filmmakers and audiences bring
to different forms of filmmaking. For the majority of popular films classifiable...

2. Power Play/s: Bisexuality as Privilege and Pathology in Sexploitation Cinema

Even more open – effusively so – to erotic explicitness
and excess than art cinema, sexploitation films use the titillation of female
bisexual desire as a primary narrative conceit. As a mode of filmmaking,
sexploitation traverses historical eras, national cinemas, genres,
aesthetic movements, and even industrial sectors. Historically, exploitation...

3. Of Cowboys and Cocksmen: Bisexuality and the Contemporary Hollywood Bromance

One of the top-grossing U.S. films of 2005 . . . credited
with transforming the U.S. film industry . . . a queering of Hollywood
genre . . . a romance between two all-American dudes . . . I refer not
only to Brokeback Mountain, but also to 2005’s other blockbuster male
love story: Wedding Crashers, which in grossing $285 million worldwide...

4. Bisexuality on the Boob Tube

As the flippancy of this chapter’s naming and epigraph
suggest, the vast majority of representations of bisexuality in television
involve femme women, with the bi-suggestive character or narrative
inevitably
reconsigned to monosexual logic – if not immediately (as
with Dana’s retort above) then soon thereafter. As a number of lucid if...

Conclusion Queer/ing Bisexuality

As I am writing these final pages, search engine
extraordinaire Google, at the lobbying of bisexual advocacy group Bi-
Net, consented to allow “bisexual” to be algorithmically prioritized as
a search term and thereby no longer ghettoized as a presumed route to
accessing pornography. That a global information provider of this magnitude...

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